This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too.

And this is a short stuff, which is why I realized now that I started this off incorrectly, short stuff.

Let's go.

That's right.

Big thanks to Britannica, Yellowstone Wild

Tours, California Department of Fish, Wildlife, New Hampshire Audubon, and Audubon for information

about the ground-headed brown-ground. Yeah. Brown-headed cowbird. Thanks to Yumi, too. She brought

this bird to my attention. Oh, I forgot.umee.org. Um, so, Chuck, we're talking today about cowbirds, and really, in particular, the brown-headed cowbird. Do you ever heard of them before? Had never heard of them. I had neither. But if you want to know about a brown-headed cowbert, the first thing you need to know about it is that it's a brood parasite. What does that mean, Chuck?

What does that mean?

Well, I had never heard of this trait in a bird either.

So a brood parasite is a bird that will be like, you know what, I don't want to build my own nest

and go through all that whole process of raising these babies that I egg out of my body. So I'm just

going to go lay those eggs and some other birds nest and then go away and shirk parenthood.

Yeah, you do it for me. How about that? Yeah. That's exactly what they do. And it, you know,

you're like, why would you do that? You have to be a jerk bird. And yeah, I think a lot of people

think of cowbirds as kind of jerk birds just for doing that. But from their point of view,

like this is just an adaptation that made a lot of sense to how they evolved originally. And they're

from North America. And they were, I think, indigenous to the Great Plains of North America.

And the reason why is because there's another animal that was indigenous to the Great Plains of North America.

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